> One advantage of most computer languages (with the arguable exception of > C, but even it has preprocessor macros) is that they provide high-level > constructs that make it easier to write programs.
Constructors and destructors are quite simple functions which are executed at particular time. You could code constructs and destructs in C if you would like to do it. Have you seen symbian's two-pass constructs ? You may think that yes, constructs are the essence of programming, but in fact they are not. More important is 1. clear, self-descriptive terminology 2. testing 3. dependency tracking (which source depends on which) 1 allows more fluent communication between programmers (and not only programmers) 2 allows to make programs which actually work. 3 improves reusability. (Which is currently does not exist in block box form - most of code is copy pasted from one place to another - white box reuse.) > I believe that many > of these high-level constructs are reduced to more verbose lower-level > constructs in some of the language front ends (I know that this is true > in Fortran; I'm not as sure about other front ends), which means that > programming in Generic will require programming at a much lower level. How to present a program in visual form so it would be easy to understand and edit is another question. I have seen programs written in C++ which were not working at all, and I have seen a programs written in pure C - which were properly tested and worked faster than C++ analogues. (And gcc is one of the examples which is written in C) Sometime high level becomes too "high". Just try to read XML standards - they are suffering from overabstraction and not bound to any particular / real problem. > I don't think your expected advantages to editing the compiler's > representation directly will counteract that disadvantage. If I edit assembler code - of course I will not benefit from it. But it must not be assembler code - it must be as close for human to understand and as simple to edit/modify as possible. -- Have a nice day! Tarmo. ____________________________________________________________________________________ 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news
